They also thought white people could own black people as chattel, the vote should be restricted solely to white males over the age of 21 who owned property, the loser of a presidential election should become VP, and that black people counted as 3/5 of a person for voting purposes (but said vote would be controlled by the white person who owned them).

Maybe you mean to say that blacks counted as 3/5 of a person for apportionment purposes (as in, how many seats a state got in the House and how many EVs a state got). Slaves didn't have the right to vote, and any white man with property that did still only got one vote.

This is actually a common misconception...even TDS got it wrong, for humor ("I cast my 5 slaves' 3 votes for James K. Polk"). If people who made the misconception were correct, then women and children would have been voting as well (as they are counted as "free persons" in that clause of the Constitution, despite not having the right to vote.)

Ding! Ding! You win the prize!

I always like to state one counter-argument totally wrong in these idiot threads, just to see if people actually have the first idea of what they're talking about. :p

My degree is history, and I did my honors thesis on the Constitution and its Amendments. I know it's for apportionment only. It's also why Gerrymandering was basically a northern-only peculiarity prior to the Civil War. Slaves not moving that much and all...

I started to say 'they thought that Senators should be elected by state legislatures', but decided the above would be more fun. Glad to see someone is awake and thinking this morning :)

Maybe the most reasonable article to ever come out of American Thinker. I don't necessarily agree with it, nor do I think trashy reality shows are saving our freedoms, but I never once looked off in the corner and said "What the fark am I reading?"

If you're worried about me, then the guns are irrelevant, because I have any number of things I can quickly and efficiently kill you with.

Failing that, I could just make a gun. It's not that hard: Guns are a 600 year old technology that can be made with tools and materials far inferior to what you can find at your local Home Depot. I could make a dandy single shot zip gun with some steel gas pipe, a few hardware doo-dads, some strike-anywhere matches, and maybe a chunk of wood for a stock, and that gun will kill you just as dead as the latest polymer-framed "Wonder Nine".

What caused this reversal of liberal dogma? Why is "gun control" now a dirty word and a guaranteed political loser?

Because they tried it, got smacked down, realized that it wasn't a winner, and stopped pushing it.

I mean, it was a stupid issue to be pushing in the first place, but in all fairness that describes every hot-button issue ever and it has nothing to do with why they stopped.

If the crazy right-wingers were less outright stupid, they'd maybe take a lesson from this and apply it to, say, the abortion issue. When something's been explicitly resolved by the courts and voters multiple time, it's maybe time to shelve it for a while.

On the one hand, I'm completely pro-Second Amendment but not a gun owner, and as such I don't really have a horse in this race. On the other hand, American Potato doesn't recognise the existence of the Fourteenth Amendment (the one that says that brown and gay people are human beings), so I just want to say that their hypocritical cherry-picking asses can bite me.

The way these farknuggets wildly masturbate to some parts of the Constitution and completely ignore the rest annoys me even more than the birther bullshiat. The Constitution is not the bloody Bible, it just doesn't work that way.

Jiro Dreams Of McRibs:I watched a Charlie Rose interview with Scalia. Rose asked him when did the politicization and polarization regarding the SCOTUS begin and when will it end?

Scalia answered it started with the Bork nomination. And he said it won't end until his side--the side that says the Constitution should not be modified by SCOTUS opinion--wins.

There is no hope left. The SCOTUS is the only political contest that cannot be "primaried" if an official makes a bad decision.

Which is why we need SCOTUS term limits, IMHO. 18 year terms, a new justice every two years. Every President gets to put 2 on the court automatically, and there's no fears of having the court locked up for a generation for one side or the other.

It wouldn't greatly alter the composition of the court in a historical sense. The average age of newly appointed justices is about 53, which would get most justices out around retirement age. And it would get around the roadblocking that has begun to pop up since the 70's. Prior to that, the average term for a justice was something like 15 years; since 1970 the average length of service has jumped up big time to something like 25-26 years.

FTA: The sole purpose of this trust would be to finance Second Amendment attorneys to prosecute litigation designed to result in judicial decisions affirming the Constitutional right of individuals to keep and bear arms.

I envisioned raising public, legislative, and judicial knowledge and awareness of the origin of, and the meaning of, the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. I was looking forward to hiring Second Amendment scholars to identify what we believed to be Second Amendment violations, and to persuading people to whom injustice had been done to become the plaintiffs in our crusade to advance liberty in America by dusting off and exalting the Second Amendment.

Had this been the first amendment you'd be the ACLU or calling yourself a ambulance chaser.

Leader O'Cola:"firearm" nope. try reading the text. "Arms", with a capital A

Arms= abbreviation of Armaments.

Notice how none of the right wing derpers ignore that they are already banned from owning nukes, chem/bio weapons, heavy ordnance, etc.

It'll be interesting to see what the argument about hand-held laser weapons will be, which will be with us in 30 years or so. Are they a nukey-style arm ("Ban them! Especially from foreighns!") or a bullet gun ("MORE! MORE!").

Actually, what's the argument for tasers? I'm not in the US, but to people consider taser ownership a "right"?

It's the buck-toothed inbred lunatics who are constantly screaming that somebody's coming to take them or that everybody who thinks there should be any measure at all to keep them out of the hands of dangerous people that we have a problem with.

If conservatives think guns are far and away the most important thing, then why don't they do more to reduce crime? Why do conservatives instead want to cut social spending and all the other things that help reduce the crime rate? If the crime rate was at all time lows, then there wouldn't be any substance to the argument to ban guns.

ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha:The right to own a firearm was considered by the Framers of the Constitution in 1787 to be equal in importance to the right to speak freely, the right to peaceably assemble and the right to practice religion*

*Offer not valid to muslims

From that article:

Rather than allowing the building of more mega-mosques in the United States, we should halt existing projects and seriously consider shutting down existing mosques to prevent the proliferation of an ideology that has publicly pledged to destroy America.

When it comes to the Constitution, I think we need to be very strict in our interpretation. So I think the second amendmant does allow for personal ownership of guns. But because I am so strict in my interpretation, I think it should be restricted only the guns available at the time the Constitution was written. In other words, you can own all the flint-lock rifles you want. Hell, you can have cannons as well. Basically, all blackpowder weapons. Anything else wasn't mention in the constitutions, so can be fully regulated. Knock yourself out with your smooth bore muskets.

Put them all together, and you get this nitwit using other people's tragedy to make his point.

[i.dailymail.co.uk image 634x422]

Yes, it was totally inappropriate the way he discussed a relevant story that was recent. That kind of discussion is reserved for quiet rooms rented out by the NRA. For a Constitution circle jerk, you sure are hating on that First Amendment awfully hard.

Put them all together, and you get this nitwit using other people's tragedy to make his point.

[i.dailymail.co.uk image 634x422]

I always forget that one of the rules of responsible gun ownership is never talking about gun violence.

If you bring it up shortly after the gun owner murders people, you're being insensitive and capitalizing on tragedy. If you bring it up awhile after the gun owner murders people, it's old news and can't you just shut up, liberal?

Bungles:Leader O'Cola: "firearm" nope. try reading the text. "Arms", with a capital A

Arms= abbreviation of Armaments.

Notice how none of the right wing derpers ignore that they are already banned from owning nukes, chem/bio weapons, heavy ordnance, etc.

It'll be interesting to see what the argument about hand-held laser weapons will be, which will be with us in 30 years or so. Are they a nukey-style arm ("Ban them! Especially from foreighns!") or a bullet gun ("MORE! MORE!").

Actually, what's the argument for tasers? I'm not in the US, but to people consider taser ownership a "right"?

Generally speaking, the second amendment is considered to cover personal armaments. Things one person can carry that can only reasonably target one person. Guns are the ones that usually come up because they're the most... equalizing of the personal arms, but technically it covers swords, knives, bows and arrows, tasers, pepper spray and so on.

Is it slightly arbitrary? Yeah. But so is the line where we allow restriction of the first amendment.

Bungles:Leader O'Cola: "firearm" nope. try reading the text. "Arms", with a capital A

Arms= abbreviation of Armaments.

Notice how none of the right wing derpers ignore that they are already banned from owning nukes, chem/bio weapons, heavy ordnance, etc.

It'll be interesting to see what the argument about hand-held laser weapons will be, which will be with us in 30 years or so. Are they a nukey-style arm ("Ban them! Especially from foreighns!") or a bullet gun ("MORE! MORE!").

Actually, what's the argument for tasers? I'm not in the US, but to people consider taser ownership a "right"?

I don't think laser guns will be all that much fun, because they aren't going to be your slow Star Wars beams. It'll be like deadly laser tag. No recoil. No nothing. Hell the laser may even cauterize the would it causes.

rufus-t-firefly:ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha: The right to own a firearm was considered by the Framers of the Constitution in 1787 to be equal in importance to the right to speak freely, the right to peaceably assemble and the right to practice religion*

*Offer not valid to muslims

From that article:

Rather than allowing the building of more mega-mosques in the United States, we should halt existing projects and seriously consider shutting down existing mosques to prevent the proliferation of an ideology that has publicly pledged to destroy America.

Because freedom.

Now THAT'S the blatant hypocrisy that I've come to known and expect from American Thinker.

Seriously though, did we just step back into the 1990's? I thought we all agreed that gun control is a political no-go.

No, we're supposed to pretend that it means something different from how it was intended.

"Hey Clem, let's make it possible for people to form them there militias.""Well, Billy-Bob, can't have none no militias if people done got no guns.""I like the cut 'o yer jib, Clem. Need a militia to fight off an evil government like we just did!""Billy-Bob, don't fergit to put in there that we need guns BECAUSE we need militias.""Will do, Clem."

Fast-forward:

"The government provides you a militia, so you can have a gun if you join it."